Last year, the popular, generally interesting website Salon Magazine (www.salonmagazine.com) announced its first annual "virgin fiction" contest, which gave unpublished writers under the age of 35 a chance to find a venue for their work. Virgin Fiction is a collection of the 20 best entries, and it's not the wildly uneven assortment of half-shaped talent that the nature of the project would suggest. At times, that's actually a shame. Instead, Virgin Fiction is a fairly homogenous assortment of polished short stories, some memorable but more of them not. Of the 20 winning authors, nine have some sort of graduate degree in creative writing, and most of the entries fit neatly into the established, Joyce-derived short-story mold. Not that that's inherently a flaw: Kathleen Holt's "Collecting The Dead" and Amy Gebler's "C-Clamp" are good examples of how to spin minor incidents into major revelations. Todd Dorman's "Wasn't That It?" and Paul R. Whyman's "The Middle Way" exhibit a notable ability to sustain a consistent mood while convincingly portraying the unpleasant sort of lives—an asylum inmate and a child prostitute in Thailand, respectively—that most readers of short-story collections will never have to experience. Most other traditionally structured entries, however, don't linger in the memory much longer than it takes to turn the page. The less numerous experimental pieces are a mixed lot: Ed Park's brief "A Note To My Translator" is funny, and Myla Goldberg's "Comprehension Test" works well, but Tony Carbone's "the end of the beltline" is a tedious, smug, failed attempt to do what Mark Leyner does much better. While worth a look, Salon's Virgin Fiction project is still more interesting in theory than in execution; you're better off browsing it than absorbing it thoroughly.